


Drive the Wedge, Torch the Bridge

by autoeuphoric (FreezingRayne)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Destiny, Dream Bubbles, Gen, Karkat Needs a Hug, Mentions of Davekat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 16:19:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4228596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreezingRayne/pseuds/autoeuphoric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The idea that you are the predestined leader of your people, the fulcrum around which the entirety of trollkind revolves, is so insipidly ridiculous that it makes your shame globes shrivel up in embarrassment just to contemplate it. It makes you sound like an actual chosen one, instead of some random bulgelick who pressed a button. </p><p>(After being knocked out by Kanaya, Karkat meets the Signless in a dream bubble. They talk revolution.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drive the Wedge, Torch the Bridge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zee/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Zee! You predicted that this shouty little asshole would steal my heart, and you were hells of correct. I'm sorry that this is a little rough, and also not the davekat that I meant to write you. I'll get there, I swear.

As soon as you feel the squish of carpet under your frond nubs and smell the heavy sweetness of sopor you say, “Shit.” Your husktop sits on your desk, monitor light pulsing a slow white, like deep breaths. Everything in your respiteblock looks the same as it always has, which is what worries you. Your respiteblock no longer exists. It’s pulverized space dust.

So again: “Shit!”

You skid into the ablution block and topple toward your mirror. Your eyes are bloodshot and slightly hysterical, but they’re there. No creepy blank ghost eyes for you. You aren’t dead. So what the fuck are you? Your think-sponge is soggy and oversaturated, recent memories sliding together into a gummy, streaky mess.

You pace back out into the block and lean toward the window. Then you lean the fuck back, because there’s someone down in your lawnring. Apart from your Lusus and the occasional snuffling undead, you’ve never seen anyone this close to your hive. Whoever they are is looking straight at your block window, like they know exactly where you are.

You stomp down the stairs, hoping it’s someone you like, or at least tolerate. That list isn’t as short as it used to be, but you are not in the mood for Dream Bubble Bullshit.

“Can I fucking help you?” You stick your head out the front door. “I don’t have time for…” You trail off, and suddenly you want to cram your first down your own ignorance shaft, because that is an _adult_ holy shit. Even in the dream, with your senses slightly muffled, you can smell the pheromones pouring off their skin, threat and danger and a choking, toxic draw. At eight sweeps you’re mature enough to be intrigued by an adult’s scent, but still young enough to be afraid.

You’re about to slam your door and send up a prayer to troll Jegus that dream bubble hives have locks, anything to put some space between you and the _actual fucking monster_ standing not two yards from you, when they pull their hood back and turn their face up to the light of the moons. For one nauseated moment you think that they don’t have horns. And yeah, you’ve got hornless friends now, but those are humans. A hornless troll is just _sick._

But no, you’re wrong. They do have horns. They’re just very, very small.

A prickly shiver starts at the tip of your nubs and travels up your torso-pillar, lodging in your shout-tunnel. _Fuck._

"Kankri?” you say, even though you know that isn’t right. This man has a strongly-hewn jaw and broad shoulders, lines gathered at the corners of his eyes. His nubby horns are almost swallowed up by a clump of mad, wiry hair. He has the face you might have one day, on the off-chance you live that long. But there’s also a gravity to him, a slow assurance that you will never have, not in a thousand sweeps.

He’s regal. You’re just an asshole.

The Signless smiles tightly, and that expression you do recognize. It’s how you look in almost all the pictures Dave has taken of you, sucking your lips together, trying not to laugh at whatever inane pointlessness is coming out of his mouth. 

"You can use that name if you like, but no one but Porrim has called me that in sweeps.” Porrim…which one is that?

“She found me when I was grub, after the Lusus that had briefly adopted me abandoned me beneath the rising sun. It must have noticed my mutation when I started to cry.”            

“Great. Random Information. Just what I fucking need right now.” It’s bulge-numbingly stupid to talk shit to an adult troll—the Signless could snap you in half without breaking a claw—but he’s an alternate version of _Kankri._ You could never bring yourself to be afraid of that pedantic, nook-sniffing, overgrown wriggler.

Just to be on the safe side you should retreat back into your hive, but instead you step out into the warm night (the perfect temperature for your warm blood) and let the door bang shut behind you. 

“Walk with me?” The Signless offers you his arm like this is some highblood court romance. “We have much to talk about.”

You snort. “This might come as a shock, oh great prophet, but you don’t have much of a following nowadays. Alternia doesn’t exist anymore, and even when it did, no one gave a single solitary shit about you. What makes you think I care about anything you have to say?”

The Signless nods at your chest. “You are wearing my sign, and unless I'm very much mistaken, you’ve worn it for some time, taking a great risk in doing it. You must have done research into your background to even know what the symbol means.” He’s smirking at you, the smug fuck. Possibly the Signless really is an asshole. A regal asshole.

“Weren’t we walking?” you scowl.

“Lead the way.”

 -       

You do. You take him up a path that winds around the circumference of the hill, eventually cresting at a rise where you can see for miles across the plain, all the way to the blending of sky and ocean. Gamzee’s hive is in that direction, although you’ve never been there.

Despite the fact that you could reach the edge of the dream bubble any time, the Signless doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to talk. He plods along beside you, hands clasped serenely behind his back. It really chafes your nook that anyone with the same freakish blood as you could look so fucking content.

“Are you going to actually talk during this talk?”

He smiles, like he’d just been waiting for such a gracious invitation. Prick.

“I want you to know, Karkat, that I can sympathize with your situation.”

“Oh, is that right? Please, great teacher, won’t you tell me more? My hear ducts are thirsty for the didactic bombardment of your knowledge-canon.”

The Signless tips his head back to stare meditatively at the sky. “I understand your role as leader, and the knowledge that you must lead your followers to what you know might well be their deaths—.”

“Argh! Stop. Stop!” You’re walking backward; you know this path so well you could follow it in broad daylight, totally sun-blind. “I know you’ve got a staggeringly high opinion of yourself, and that’s great. Self esteem is terrific. But, surprise! I’m not you. And I’m not a leader anymore, if I even way one in the first place. And I’m definitely not a fucking revolutionary.”

“Not a revolutionary.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No! Why are we saying the same word back and forth? I am. Not.”

“I see.” The Signless taps his chin with a dark forefinger, more disingenuous than even Dave at his most transparently ironic. “Are you sure?”

“Yes! I already told Kanaya—oh, _fuck!_ Kanaya!” Parts of your think-sponge are rolling off their piles to shake themselves off. “We went talk to Echidna. She needed a blood player, and arrgh!” You bury your fingers in your own hair and twist until your eyes tear up. “The battle is happening right now, isn’t it? Why the taintlicking fuck am I asleep?”

“You aren’t meant to fight in this battle,” the Signless says. He isn’t smiling anymore.

 “How the fuck do you know that? You never even played the game! You just sat around campfires and made speeches and inducted ex-slaves into your crazy you-worshiping cult!”

For the first time, you see a flicker of annoyance cross the Signless’s face. “True, I never played, but your Kankri did. And I spent my life plagued by visions of Beforus, haunted by the shape the world could have taken. A place where the strong protected the weak instead of crushing them, where being culled meant being cared for.”

You take a hard breath.

“Okay, yeah, you’re right. I did know about you. I researched you. I even got Sollux to hack into the imperial database for classified files! And you know what? I thought you were an idiot.” You’re shouting again, and the dream is reacting to the volatile emotions, wind tearing across the plain and over the crest of the hill, clutching at the Signless’s cloak and pressing your hair down flat into your eyes. You force it back with a palm. “Eridan and Vriska and Terezi were all obsessed with their ancestors! And why wouldn’t they be? They were some legit Alternian badasses, and you were some mutant upstart who instigated some huge fight you couldn’t possibly win! But I wore your sign anyway, because you were so brave. Stupid, yeah, but really fucking brave. You didn’t hide in your hive—.” You swallow. “—Like anyone else would. You went out there and did the one thing that would get your dumb ass culled, or worse.”

“Much worse,” the Signless says quietly.

You’ve seen artist renders and read the accounts of the Signless’ public execution. You’ve imagined the stench of burning flesh and the swish of the threshcutioner’s whips.

 “Don’t you think that some things are worth dying for?” the Signless pushes. “I know you’ve suffered. I know you think the hemospectrum is ridiculous and needs to be done away with.”

  “Of course I think it’s ridiculous! Only tight-nooked sycophants like Equius give a shit about blood color or think it actually has any bearing on how competent a troll you are! But I never thought about overthrowing the Empire.” Your voice cracks and the corners of your eyes burn. Of all the people you don’t want to cry in front of. “I used to—I used to fantasize about being born a sea dweller. A cocky, fin-faced douche with a crooked fish-hooking device stuffed permanently up my waste-chute. Other embarrassing fantasies include: hiding my blood color for long enough to join the threshcutioners and become the Empress’s personal bodyguard, and one where the hemospectrum was flipped and sea dwellers were trash, red meant royalty, and being born a mutant meant—.”

“Being a chosen one?” The Signless’s mouth quirks. “I had that dream myself, on occasion. But you don’t need to flip the hemospectrum to make that a reality, Karkat. It’s already truer than you know.”

 “Oh my god, stop.” You rub at your forehead. “That is the exact opposite of what I’m telling you. I’m not your goddamn second coming. I didn’t want to destroy the hemospectrum, okay? I wanted to be on top of it! I didn’t care about fucking equality and mercy and holding hands like a bunch of wrigglers at their first schoolfeed. Even if that highblood masturbatory hoofbeast shit turns out to be true and we do inherent our ancestor’s lineage, well, I guess that means I got the vein-popping ragegasms and an unquenchable fucknozzle of a shout tunnel from you. So, thanks for that, but I’m not going to finish what you started.”

 _But you already have, haven’t you? Funny how everything that has gone wrong in your session was directly or indirectly due to your own incompetence._ Like your think-pan is a forum and your conscience is one of your snide future selves, a needling voice whispers into your aural nub. _All the sea dwellers are dead, and the only highblood left in existence is currently festering in a thermal hull along with the severed heads of his victims. And if everything ends up going the way Vriska has planned it, you’re all going to create a brand new universe and defeat Her Imperious Condescension, and because of your aspect, a snake is going to put you in charge of it._

In a fucked-up way totally exemplifying Paradox Space’s morbid sense of humor, you’ve already fulfilled your lineage. But the idea that you are the predestined leader of your people, the fulcrum around which the entirety of trollkind revolves, is so insipidly ridiculous that it makes your shame globes shrivel up in embarrassment just to contemplate it. It makes you sound like an actual chosen one, instead of some random bulgelick who pressed a button.

It makes you…god, it makes you _so angry._ To the point that the wind is howling and little patches of light have begun to break through the placid night sky. Just, the fact that you were always destined for this, and no matter how awful you are, no matter how much damage you do, as long as you remain in the Alpha Timeline, this is the way it was always meant to be. Foretold by the game or by fate. You’re starting to think they might be the same thing.

 “It’s not rare for a leader to have regrets, Karkat,” the Signless says gently, and not for the first time you get the feeling that he’s reading your mind the way no mutantblood should be able to. It just makes you angrier.

“You don’t get it!” you roar. Another ray of light bursts down from out of the clouds. Soon undead are going to come clawing out of the ground. “I don’t have regrets! Or, I do, I have all the regrets, I fucked up so many times, but—.” Your breaths come in wheezy gasps and you want to stop talking, but it’s like the words are being pulled from the center of you. You have no more control over them than you do the thumping of your pump biscuit. “If I had the chance to do it all again, I wouldn’t do anything different.”

And that’s the truth. That is why you will never be a hero. If someone granted you zappy canon-fuck powers, and you could return to Alternia to the moment before you sent out the virus that killed your Lusus and doomed you and everyone else to a never-ending hoofbeast-tornado of sheer idiocy, you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t go back to being the scared little wriggler that hid in his hive, destined to live his entire short life miserably alone. You’ve fought and kicked and screamed, and people have screamed back. You've stood beneath sunlight that doesn't scorch your skin, listened to some _truly_ awful music, felt the heat of a body as warm as yours. You’ve spent a torturous sweep and a half in the presence of some of the most enraging douchetards in Paradox Space, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. And Dave may not know the first thing about being a Matesprit, but he’s yours, and you aren’t giving him up.

It’s pretty simple, actually.

“I don’t know why you’re here,” you say, cutting off whatever new platitude he’d been about to spout. “It’s probably to convince me to sit the final battle out to keep my precious leader meatsack alive. Or you actually want me to fight, and you’re using some subtle psychological device that only Lalonde would care about or understand. That doesn’t actually matter.”

In the distance you can see a faint shimmer, a vacillation of color, land and sky slowly degrading.

“Then what does matter?” the Signless asks, and then he’s gone. You’ve reached the edge of the dream bubble. Which is lucky, since you don’t have an answer.

You wake up outside Echidna’s cave, mouth coated with the taste of ash, turtleneck sweated through. The ache in your think pan is so bad that for a few seconds you think you may vomit. You roll onto your front and take several heaving breaths. Kanaya is nowhere to be seen.

With a shaking hand you dig into your pocket for your mobile husk. You’ve got a wall of messages waiting for you. You swipe them all aside and bring up Turntech Godhead’s log.

CG: HEY ASSHOLE. I HOPE YOU’RE IN THE MOOD FOR A FETCH QUEST.

TG: can this wait i'm kind of in the middle of something here

CG: NO. COME GET ME.

TG: what the fuck happened

CG: I’LL EXPLAIN ON THE WAY

_\--_

_Stay good under pressure for years and years and years and years_  
_President of the fan club up there choking on his tears_  
_Let all the trash rain down from way up in the rafters_  
_I’m walking out of here in one piece, don’t care what comes after_  
_Drive the wedge, torch the bridge  
_ _I don’t want to die in here_

"Heel Turn 2", The Mountain Goats 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hand-waved some of Karkat's knowledge of the Signless's life. I assumed he must know at least something about him, if he's wearing the cancer symbol.


End file.
